Frequently Asked Questions

You fill in five fields about your idea: the problem, target audience, monetization model, acquisition channel, and your technical background. A deterministic rule engine then runs 38 checks across eight dimensions (pain, market, competition, distribution, monetization, build ease, founder edge, and overall opportunity). The report you see is built from those fired rules, with an optional AI layer that polishes the narrative. Numbers never come from the model.

No. Startup MRI is not a predictor and never claims to be. It surfaces the risks, blind spots, and untested assumptions that most often kill indie projects. The decision, and the outcome, are still yours.

Validation asks: is the problem real, do people want this solved, and will they pay? Execution asks: can this specific team ship the product and reach the first 100 customers in a reasonable time? Startup MRI scores both. A great validation can still die on execution, and a strong team can still ship something nobody wants.

Every score is a sum of weighted points from individual rules. Each rule fires (or does not fire) based on a condition in your input — your audience, your chosen channel, your monetization model, your technical background, and the wording of your idea. The page-level evidence section shows which rules fired and why.

Read the reasoning, not just the label. A NO-GO usually means one of two things: a critical assumption is high-risk and untested, or the inputs you provided describe a business model that does not fit your distribution or founder profile.

Read the critical-assumption section first. If that single assumption turns out to be false, the rest of the plan is irrelevant. Then work through the 4-week first-customer plan as a checklist.

AI is useful for the narrative and for compressing the rule engine's output into plain English. It is not used to assign scores or to decide whether your idea is good. Every number, threshold, and recommendation in the report traces back to a specific fired rule.

Stop asking where customers are. Start asking where people are already trying to solve the problem — Reddit threads, Slack groups, Facebook groups, competitor reviews. Find those rooms and you no longer need to 'find customers' — you are already in them. The pillar article on finding first customers walks through the weekly plan.

Only by charging them. Surveys and interviews produce polite interest, not payment. The willingness-to-pay pillar walks through the small, fast experiments — presales, deposits, fake-door pricing — that separate real demand from imagined demand.

A problem interview, then a landing-page test, then a presale or a deposit request. Each step takes a week, costs almost nothing, and produces evidence you can act on. The full sequence lives in the validation checklist.

Indie hackers, solopreneurs, no-code founders, side-hustle creators, and first-time founders who want a structured look at their idea before spending months building. If you are one person (or a small team) deciding whether to commit the next 6 months of your life, this is built for you.

No. Most of the validation work happens before you write code, and none of it requires technical skill. The question is whether you are willing to talk to strangers about a problem you suspect they have.